Meshack Kabul is a living testimony of 'it's never over until it is over' phrase as he refused to let go of his 44-year ambition of developing a lightning arrestor.
The engineer from Siaya has a number of innovations under his belt, managing to innovate the maize stripping machine used to separate the seeds from the cob.
The 70-year-old embarked on his lightning arrestor innovation after a number of people from the area lost their lives due to frequent thunderstorms in the area.
Kabul started work on the magnetic spike lightning arrester in 1975 after residents vandalised the copper-based ones to sell as scrap metal.
"We have other arrestors like the copper strip but people discovered that when you get copper and sell it as scrap, one can earn a lot of money," he noted.
His desire to develop a lightning arrestor was fuelled after the then Russia Hospital now known as Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital had their lightning arrestors looted.
"There was a time someone came from Nairobi and pretended to be a technician sent by the government but he was not and stole all the copper strips.
"We had a director known as Josiah Ndinga from Mombasa, who asked me for solutions to the perennial stealing of lightning arrestors," Kabul explained.
The veteran scientist revealed that he almost gave up on his innovation after failing over the years but in 2015 he managed to fully complete it.
"It took me 42 years of research to came up with what I wanted, I called the Government to approve it and in 2015 the Ministry of Environment did a test on the product," he stated.
After two years of rigorous testing, the Ministry handed Kabul a certificate to prove that his invention had met the standards.
{"preview_thumbnail":"/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/egJ6FyjgyzU.jpg?itok=Z2BYKQkh","video_url":"","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"480","autoplay":0},"settings_summary":["Embedded Video (Responsive)."]}
